Scaling Meta Ads in 2025 Playbook
20 min
Spiral Team
Aug 28, 2025
From $0 to $100K a month, profitably
Most teams never break $100K a month on Meta. Why? Scaling on Meta can feel messy, with lots of moving parts and real pressure to hit targets. Budgets climb, CAC swings, and plenty can go wrong. I’ve been there, and I know how stressful it can get.
I’m Sasha, co-founder at Spiral.ad, and I have spent 7 years running Meta campaigns with more than $20M in spend across ecommerce, streaming platforms, and subscription apps. In this guide I share exactly how I would take a product from 0 to $100K/month by profitably scaling Meta Ads. I am not covering what comes after $100K. If you reach that point, well done. You will know your own playbook better than any outside guide.
This playbook is written with B2C digital products in mind, that’s where I’ve spent most of my career. One important note: there’s no universal formula for Meta Ads, but here’s how I’d approach it if I were launching my own product today. It’s distilled from 7 years of hands-on experience with the platform.
The state of Meta in 2025
Meta doesn’t work the way it did 5 years ago. Back then, targeting hacks and micro-optimizations were the main levers. Today, the system is smarter and heavier lifting happens on a creative side. Here are the key shifts to understand before starting:
Creative is the new targeting. Meta analyzes your ad content — text, visuals, audio — and uses it to figure out who should see it. A single great creative can outperform the best custom audience.
Broad is the default. Advantage+ campaigns and wide audiences consistently beat stacked interest targeting. The system needs room to learn.
Signal quality matters more than hacks. Clean Conversions API setup, deduplicated events, and stable conversion definitions are what keep performance consistent. Weak signals equal unstable CAC.
Creative diversity prevents fatigue. Short video is dominant, but static still works. Mixing formats, hooks, and angles keeps campaigns alive longer.
The formula for scaling in 2025 = quantity × diversity of ads. Growth comes from consistently feeding the system fresh inputs and letting it learn.
The Foundation for Scaling
Before we dive deeper, let’s do a quick check-up to see if Meta Ads is the right move for you right now. In many cases, I’d actually recommend focusing on other channels first. Here’s the checklist:
Budget. Do you have at least $10K/month to test? You need enough conversions for the system to learn. If you’re below that, consider other channels that are less capital-intensive.
Team. Can you dedicate at least one person to own your Meta Ads? Scaling isn’t a side project, running ads part-time is a recipe for wasted money.
Product–Market Fit. Are there clear early signs of demand and retention? Ads are great for amplifying growth, but they cannot fix churn or low conversion rates.
If you answered yes to all three, congrats! You are ready to move on. Let’s start by breaking down each point in more detail.
Budget
Scaling on Meta Ads requires money, mostly ad spend and team salary. The core principle is simple: your Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) should be lower than your Lifetime Value (LTV).
If you are selling a one-time purchase product, paid marketing is often simpler. You can aim to break even or even profit on the first purchase, then reinvest those returns directly into more ads.
If you are running a subscription model, cash flow gets trickier. Most of your revenue comes over time, so you need enough upfront capital to cover ad spend while waiting for those subscriptions to pay back. Without that runway, scaling stalls quickly.
Know your cash needs upfront. Always model a downside case where ROAS stays far below break-even for the first three months. If the math still works, you’re in a safe spot to start.
Team
The ideal starting team setup in 2025 is a Performance Marketer + Creative Producer + Video Editor. This is also the first year you can skip having a dedicated Graphic Designer, since AI can now generate high-quality static ads at scale. Looking ahead, 2026 will likely be the first year you can run without a Video Editor as well.
At the $0–100K stage, some roles can be combined. A strong Performance Marketer can often act as both buyer and Creative Producer, outsourcing video editing until volume grows. What matters is not titles but ownership. Someone must fully own performance, someone must own creative, and both must work closely together.
In the early stages, founders often shape messaging, approve creatives, and track key numbers. Over time, they should step back from execution and let the team run, focusing on strategy and growth levers instead.
Product–Market Fit
The best advice here is to build something people actually want. If your product isn’t delivering value to its users, then it’s much harder to promote it profitably. Trust me, I speak from experience.
Before putting money into Meta, make sure monetization is set up and tested, and that you already know your first key product metrics such as retention, conversion, and LTV. A useful rule of thumb is to expect paid users to perform about 30% worse than organic users.
Meta lets you drive thousands of people to your website or app fast. Treat that traffic as a testing ground. Run A/B tests, track the numbers, and use the data to improve every step of your funnel. The faster you iterate, the higher you can scale.
Would you still be excited to spend $100K if paid users converted 30% worse than organic? If the answer is yes, you are in a strong place to grow.
Hiring
Before making your first hire, get advice from experienced Meta marketers or CMOs. Talk to someone who has scaled companies in your niche or close to it. They can give you realistic CAC benchmarks, working ad formats, and a sense of what your competitors are doing. If you do not know where to start, platforms like GrowthMentor are a useful resource (not an ad).
Performance Marketer
Your first key hire should be a Performance Marketer. This can be part-time or full-time depending on how fast you want to move. Look for someone who has already worked successfully with Meta Ads and is ready to take on more responsibility, starting from scratch with greater ownership and autonomy. This person should fully own your Meta Ads, setting up accounts, events, and integrations the right way.
Creative Producer
The Creative Producer should be your second hire. They are the bridge between performance and content, making sure you test enough formats, hooks, and concepts. A strong hire understands how to produce winning ads and can build effective ad production processes that keep the system learning. Hands-on experience with AI tools is essential in 2025, as this is the biggest trend in ad production and the key advantage you can have on Meta right now.
Common Mistakes to avoid
Hiring an intern as your first hire. They might be talented, but without experience they will not know how to set up from zero, navigate tracking, or troubleshoot when things break. You need someone who has already seen how Meta operates from the inside.
Hiring a general marketer instead of a Meta specialist. Someone with broad marketing skills but no real Meta Ads expertise will struggle to set things up quickly and correctly. Previous hands-on experience will save you money and increase your chances of success.
Outsourcing everything to an agency right away. Agencies are great once you already have a working system, but early on you should own your setup and learn the fundamentals. Otherwise, you will be dependent from day one and may not be able to move fast enough to stay competitive. I cover how to work successfully with agencies later in this playbook.
Meta Ads Setup
Technical implementation deserves its own post, since it’s too nuanced and big topic to cover in this playbook. You can find plenty of detailed guides online or simply ask ChatGPT. Here, I will just mention some tips to make the process smoother:
Verify your business details early (domain, business ID, payment method). Delays here can block your start for days.
Start with at least two ad accounts: one for active campaigns and one as backup. Account bans or payment issues still happen.
Use two-factor authentication for everyone with access to your ad accounts. Remind your team they may get scam emails about account bans or pro support. Always double-check domains.
Define one clear primary conversion event (purchase, subscription, signup). Use standard events and avoid custom ones.
While the Meta Pixel is enough to start, implement the Conversions API (CAPI) for your main conversion events once you reach $10K per month in spend. This provides Meta with cleaner data and improves targeting.
Creating Ads
Meta is a creative-first platform. The top 5% of ads capture ~80% of spend. To get there, you need both quantity and diversity of creative.
Creative is your biggest leverage on Meta, and also the biggest bottleneck for most companies. To find those winning 5% of ads, you need to treat creative production like a gold mine — launching dozens, hundreds, even thousands of variations guided by your performance data.
For perspective, some top mobile app advertisers launch 5,000+ ad variations every month. That sheer volume of testing is what sets them apart from dozens of competitors. That’s why building a system for consistent creative output is the foundation of scaling.
But don’t let that overwhelm you, this playbook is here to break it down and walk you through the main steps one by one.
Competitor Research
Before creating your own ads, study what your competitors are doing on Meta Ads. This gives you a baseline for what works in your market and helps you spot gaps you can exploit.
List your competitors. Write down at least 10 direct or indirect competitors.
Collect their ads. Use the Meta Ads Library, ad analytics tools, or Spiral to find and study their creatives.
Analyze their approach. Look at the balance between static and video, the ad formats they use, the audiences they seem to target, the emotional triggers in their messaging, and the headlines or hooks that stand out.
Document insights. Create a simple competitor ads file with screenshots, notes, and patterns you observe. This becomes your reference point for ideation and differentiation.
Don’t be afraid to adapt competitors’ ideas, it’s a proven route and often a great starting point. But the bigger wins come when you understand the creative language of your market and use it to shape your own value proposition.
Your Value Proposition
Your competitors are targeting the same audience you want to reach. This means your audience has probably already seen several ads promising solution close to yours. To win, especially in crowded markets, you cannot just repeat what others are saying. You need a distinct value proposition, a new angle or approach that cuts through the noise and gives people a reason to choose you over everyone else. Let’s cover this step by step:
Define the problems you solve. List the main functional and emotional problems your product addresses. Use the same language your current customers use, or even better, talk directly with them. The best approach is to identify why your current customers already chose your product. The more unique problems you solve, the broader your addressable audience.
Identify why it matters now. Explain the urgency and add context. Why is this a problem worth solving today? The stronger your “why now” the easier it is to win attention.
Craft your core promise. For each of the problems you listed, define the clear promise your product delivers. Boil it down to one simple sentence that explains what you do. Your core promise should be short, memorable, and strong enough to become the foundation of your ads. Example: “The easiest way to [do X] without [problem].”
Expand into key angles. Break each core promise into 3–4 different angles you can test in ads. Each angle highlights a specific benefit: saving money, saving time, reducing stress, looking better, unlocking fun, etc. Example: Save time → “10 minutes a day is enough to make progress.”
Layer on emotional triggers. Tie each angle to a feeling that motivates action: relief, excitement, pride, security, belonging. Logical benefits get attention, but emotions drive clicks and conversions. Check out the Life Force 8 framework to understand which emotional triggers drive people to act. Example: Save time → relief: “Finally, a method that fits into your busy life.”
When you combine these steps, you turn a generic product pitch into a sharp value proposition with multiple testable angles. The key is to make sure every ad speaks to both rational benefits and emotional triggers. Start with at least 20 different angles, then experiment and double down on what works. This is just your starting point.
Effective Process
Ad production is a weekly, repeatable process. To make it work, you need tight communication between marketers and creative producers, clear ownership of tasks, a weekly production plan, well-organized asset storage, and a structured system to keep everything moving.
Tips for building an effective ad production process:
Set a weekly target. Decide how many new ads you will produce each week and stick to it. Start small, then increase output by about 10% each week as your team gets more efficient. Consistency beats one-off bursts.
Review performance. Hold weekly or twice-weekly check-ins between performance and creative. Kill underperformers, scale winners, and feed learnings directly into the next briefs.
Repurpose systematically. Each concept should generate multiple variations. For video, test different hooks, models, lengths, and text overlays. For static, test different styles, headlines, and visual elements.
Double down on what works. Create variations of every winning concept. A single ad might last only a few months, but strong concepts can work for years. Produce both small tweaks and deeper reworks to keep performance alive.
Set a win rate target. When you are just starting out, aim for about 10% of your ad concepts (not variations) to become winners. As you scale, expect that rate to drop closer to 5%, since low-hanging fruits disappear and your bar for a “winner” gets much higher.
Centralize assets. Store footage, raw files, and finished ads in one shared place with clear naming rules. It saves hours every week.
Focus on the right aspect ratios. For static, use 1:1 or 4:5, and resize to 9:16 only for proven winners. For video, 9:16 is enough. Keep everything inside the central 4:5 safe zone and let Meta automatically crop for Feed.
Test fast, not perfect. Launch variations quickly. Real audience data beats internal debates, and speed helps you find winners before fatigue sets in.
Build a feedback loop. Document what worked and why. Over time this becomes your creative playbook.
At Spiral, we make this entire process easier and faster. We’ve built our tool with this experience inside, and some of the most time-consuming steps are automated. From generating variations to tracking results, Spiral lets your team focus on strategy and ideation.
Testing Ads
First, understand the philosophy behind testing. The goal is not to find a perfect ad right away, but to quickly learn which angles, hooks, and formats resonate with your audience. Think of testing as buying data, not just buying conversions. This phase is an investment into future scale. The insights you gain now compound later, the ads you scale will come from patterns you discover during testing.
How to structure testing campaings
Start by dividing all campaigns into testing campaigns and scaling campaigns. Inside testing campaigns, each ad set should represent one ad concept you want to test. Each ad concept should contain 3–6 ad variations. Sometimes it can be more or less, but sticking to this range keeps learning efficient.
By default, use budget per ad set. This ensures every ad concept gets spend and is tested. Some ads will not receive meaningful impressions, that is normal. Allocate small, controlled budgets per concept ($50–$250 daily).
Switch to budget per campaign with multiple new ad sets only in two cases:
You do not have a marketer monitoring campaign performance daily. This way, you avoid overspending on ads that clearly do not work.
Your testing budget is limited and you need to find a winner right now. You risk losing insights and overall performance long-tem, but it can surface a new winning ad faster.
Avoid uploading all new weekly ads on the same day. Too many new ads at once can destabilize performance. Add no more than 25% of your total active ads per day.
Metrics to track
When testing ads, look at different signals. Early signals tell you if an ad grabs attention, mid signals show whether that attention is qualified, and final decision metrics confirm if the ad is profitable.
Early signals: CTR, thumbstop rate, engagement rate, CPC. These help you filter quickly, if people are not stopping or clicking, the ad will not scale.
Mid signals: Click-to-conversion rate, cost per signup, trial, or add-to-cart. These show if the traffic you are buying is qualified and if your funnel is doing its job.
Final decision metrics: CAC and ROAS. These are what you ultimately scale on. Once an ad consistently reach or beats your benchmarks here, it becomes a winner.
How to interpret results:
If early signals are weak but mid signals are strong, you probably found the right problem to solve, but the creative is not catching attention. Iterate on hooks, angles, and emotional triggers to make the ad stop the scroll.
If early signals are strong but mid signals are weak, the ad grabs attention but fails to convert. This means the format, hook, or key angle works for engagement but does not clearly communicate your product’s value. Iterate on these elements to turn attention into conversions. Note: we are not covering cases where your website or app itself fails to convert users.
Common mistakes
Testing too few creatives. Without enough quantity and diversity, you will not generate reliable learnings. You need a steady pipeline of new concepts to increase your odds of finding winners.
Over-optimizing for CTR. High click-through rates can look promising but mean little if those clicks do not convert. CTR is the most important attention metric, but it is too far from revenue. I have seen many winning ads with CTR below 1% that scaled profitably because they converted those few clicks extremely well.
Iterating on too many things at once. When testing variations of a winning ad, only change one element at a time. Otherwise, you cannot know which change caused the performance shift.
Stop creative testing. Halting creative testing after finding a winning concept is one of the biggest mistakes that limits growth. Every ad fatigues. If you stop launching new ideas, costs rise and performance stalls.
Relying on one ad type. Leaning on a single format or style, even if it works, is another trap that caps growth. Without exploring new angles and emotional triggers, performance flattens. Diversity keeps the system learning and results improving.
Failing to document learnings. Without a simple record of what worked and why, your team will waste resources repeating old mistakes. Build a feedback loop where every test adds to your creative playbook.
Scaling Ads
Now that you’ve finished testing, you know what your CAC and ROAS look like. At this point you need to decide whether to scale, keep testing, or pause. A strong winner can often cut CAC in half, but do not expect miracles — getting 5x cheaper results after testing 20 concepts is rare.
Sometimes ROAS will be lower than you hoped, and that is completely normal. It usually means the product or funnel needs more work before Meta can become your growth engine. The good news is that every round of testing gives you valuable data you can use to improve landing pages, onboarding, monetization, and pricing.
If you have found potential winners, congratulations! You nailed the testing phase, and now you have the foundation to scale. Scaling is about building on those wins, increasing spend with confidence, and keeping CAC and ROAS steady as you grow.
Stop vs Scale
Stop
Kill an ad after spending ~3-7× your CAC if it’s below benchmarks.
Turn off the ad set after ~5-10× CAC if results are still far from target.
Grey Zone
If results are borderline, not bad enough to stop but not strong enough to scale, let the ad run longer. You could increase the ad set budget by 20%.
Use insights from these ads to iterate on creatives. Sometimes a small variation turns a near-miss into a winner.
Scale
Once an ad consistently meets or beats your targets and has 10+ conversions, move it into scaling campaigns.
Keep iterating on ads that you push into scaling.
How to structure scaling campaings
There’s no single “correct” way to scale. Some of my advice may even differ from Meta’s own playbook, which is why you should always test in your account and, ideally, get input from an experienced marketer in your niche.
My go-to setup: campaign-level budget with 1–4 ad sets per campaign and no more than 25 ads in total. Each ad set should combine static + video for diversity, and all traffic should go to the same landing page or app. Only run ads that are proven or strong potential winners. You can keep adding new creatives into a working campaign — but never touch the targeting.
Use the broadest targeting that makes sense for your product. Add limits only if it’s clearly necessary. For example, if you have historical data showing poor performance in certain countries, audiences, or placements. Otherwise, the general rule is: don’t limit Meta.
Remember that every campaign, ad set, and ad starts in the Learning Phase, where Meta tests to find the right audience. This phase ends after ~50 optimization events per ad set. Major edits (budget, targeting, optimization event) reset learning, so avoid big changes once a campaign is performing.
When a campaign is working, you have two ways to scale:
Duplicate the campaign. My preferred method. It lets you scale faster and more stably. You can duplicate exactly or make small tweaks in the copy.
Increase budget. Safe rule: raise by ~20% every 3 days, or 5–7% daily. Larger jumps almost always push the campaign back into learning and cause unstable results.
Most products perform better on weekends, so it’s common to scale campaigns before the weekend and pause poor-performing ones on Monday.
Audience Expansion
Expansion is one of the biggest levers for scaling because it unlocks new audiences. Once you’ve proven your ads work with a core audience, the fastest way to grow is by reaching people you haven’t tapped yet.
Ways to expand:
Geography. Test new countries or regions where your product can operate. Start with markets similar to your core audience in purchasing power and culture. Research local competition and regulations, and adjust pricing and payment methods to fit the market.
Language. Localize your product and ads into new languages. Even within the same country, native-language ads often outperform English. In my own campaigns, simply translating top English creatives into Spanish drove a 25% MRR lift in 1 month.
Demographics. Test new age groups or genders with tailored creatives or messaging. Even small shifts can reveal segments with lower CAC or higher LTV, then you could expand further by adapting or customizing your product further.
Problems and Promises. Explore new value propositions by highlighting different problems your product solves or alternate benefits it delivers. The more problems you can credibly solve, the broader your reach and the more durable your growth.
Creative Analysis
This is where you turn performance data into scaling decisions. The goal is not to look at every metric but to focus on the ones that directly drive CAC and ROAS.
At the scaling stage, monitor performance daily but make decisions every 2–3 days. Daily spikes can be misleading, while multi-day trends show whether ads are truly working.
Keep reports simple, less is often more. Whenever possible, set them up to run automatically, whether through a Google Sheets script or an external tool. If automation isn’t an option, it’s worth asking if the data is truly essential. Manual reporting can take up a lot of time and energy that’s better spent on insights and action.
The real value of analysis is spotting patterns: which concepts keep winning, which creatives fatigue fastest, how CAC moves as you raise budgets, and which campaigns stay efficient at scale. Feed these insights directly into your creative pipeline so each new batch of ads has a higher chance of success.
How to work with Agencies
Working with agencies can be a powerful lever, but only if you approach it the right way. Treat agencies as partners, not magicians. They can bring fresh ideas and extra capacity, but they can’t fix a weak product or broken funnel.
Start by booking calls with multiple agencies that have proven success in your industry or with your competitors. If you don’t know where to begin, Clutch is a useful directory (not an ad). Choose agencies that understand your marketing goals, run smooth briefing process, offer clear pricing, and most importantly — earn your trust.
Agencies generally fall into two categories. Below I’ll share how to work with both and give practical tips for building strong partnerships. In my case, only about 1 in 5 pilots has turned into a long-term relationship, so it’s smart to test multiple agencies in parallel to find the right fit.
Ad production agencies
This type of agency can be useful at any stage. They help bring in new creative formats, boost output, and add diversity to your testing pool. That said, never rely on agencies alone. You need in-house production to double down on winners. Agencies bring fresh ideas, but only your own team can iterate fast enough to scale.
Most agencies charge per creative asset. A setup I like is running two sprints per month: every two weeks the agency delivers a set number of ad concepts, you test them, then return with performance data. This rhythm keeps output consistent and ensures you’re learning quickly.
To make the relationship work, build a data flywheel. Share your creative insights, audience learnings, and internal data so the agency can refine concepts and deliver stronger ads over time. Review results and give feedback every two weeks to close the loop before the next batch.
Another best practice is to work with a local agency when entering a new language or geography. They bring market expertise that speeds up your launch, and you’ll learn from them as you build your own playbook.
Pefrormance Agencies
Bring in performance agencies only once you already have some scale and solid historical data to guide negotiations. Usually after you’re spending at least $30K per month. Without that data, you’ll have no leverage, and most agencies will treat you as an easy client to bill rather than a long-term partner to grow with.
At this stage, the right agency can give you leverage to grow faster, especially when incentives are aligned. The best setups tie compensation to revenue or profit share, not flat fees.
I recommend working only with agencies that produce their own creatives and cover ad production costs on their side. This lets you learn from their winning concepts without risking them reusing or copying your ads, which would put you in direct competition for the same audience.
To set them up for success, share key data: your top-performing ad concepts, the demographics that convert best, and the essentials about your product. This ensures they produce the right creatives and configure their ad accounts correctly. Always request read access to those ad accounts for full transparency.
Discuss target KPIs and campaign limits before you start. Be clear on what CAC or ROAS is acceptable for you. For pilots, I recommend setting guardrails to make sure they focus on high-quality audiences. Once they prove they can deliver results, you can relax those limits so they have more room to scale.
Knowing when to stop working with an agency is just as important as knowing when to hire one. Agencies should be true growth partners — proactive in testing, iterating, and scaling. The right ones create leverage and open new opportunities, the wrong ones drain budget and slow you down. Once you see the relationship isn’t adding value, cut ties quickly. But if you’ve found a long-term growth partner, congratulations!
What’s next
AI is changing how ads are made and will keep reshaping the game. On Meta, your job is to compete for attention and sell solutions to people’s needs. Teams that adopt AI tools today move faster, test more ideas, and adapt quicker than those still stuck in manual workflows. Staying ahead here isn’t optional, it’s your survival and competitive edge.
Start simple and move fast. The path forward is about momentum, not perfection. Keep launching, keep learning, and keep feeding the system with fresh ideas. Each round of testing sharpens your edge, and each win builds a stronger foundation for the next.
Every product and team scales differently. Meta is never a straight path — too many variables, too many things outside your control. What I’ve shared here comes from 7 years of trial and error, and my hope is that it puts you a few steps ahead.
Thanks for reading. I’m grateful you spent your time here, and I’d love to hear how your journey goes. You can always reach me at sasha@spiral.ad
Scaling Meta Ads in 2025 Playbook
20 min
Spiral Team
Aug 28, 2025
From $0 to $100K a month, profitably
Most teams never break $100K a month on Meta. Why? Scaling on Meta can feel messy, with lots of moving parts and real pressure to hit targets. Budgets climb, CAC swings, and plenty can go wrong. I’ve been there, and I know how stressful it can get.
I’m Sasha, co-founder at Spiral.ad, and I have spent 7 years running Meta campaigns with more than $20M in spend across ecommerce, streaming platforms, and subscription apps. In this guide I share exactly how I would take a product from 0 to $100K/month by profitably scaling Meta Ads. I am not covering what comes after $100K. If you reach that point, well done. You will know your own playbook better than any outside guide.
This playbook is written with B2C digital products in mind, that’s where I’ve spent most of my career. One important note: there’s no universal formula for Meta Ads, but here’s how I’d approach it if I were launching my own product today. It’s distilled from 7 years of hands-on experience with the platform.
The state of Meta in 2025
Meta doesn’t work the way it did 5 years ago. Back then, targeting hacks and micro-optimizations were the main levers. Today, the system is smarter and heavier lifting happens on a creative side. Here are the key shifts to understand before starting:
Creative is the new targeting. Meta analyzes your ad content — text, visuals, audio — and uses it to figure out who should see it. A single great creative can outperform the best custom audience.
Broad is the default. Advantage+ campaigns and wide audiences consistently beat stacked interest targeting. The system needs room to learn.
Signal quality matters more than hacks. Clean Conversions API setup, deduplicated events, and stable conversion definitions are what keep performance consistent. Weak signals equal unstable CAC.
Creative diversity prevents fatigue. Short video is dominant, but static still works. Mixing formats, hooks, and angles keeps campaigns alive longer.
The formula for scaling in 2025 = quantity × diversity of ads. Growth comes from consistently feeding the system fresh inputs and letting it learn.
The Foundation for Scaling
Before we dive deeper, let’s do a quick check-up to see if Meta Ads is the right move for you right now. In many cases, I’d actually recommend focusing on other channels first. Here’s the checklist:
Budget. Do you have at least $10K/month to test? You need enough conversions for the system to learn. If you’re below that, consider other channels that are less capital-intensive.
Team. Can you dedicate at least one person to own your Meta Ads? Scaling isn’t a side project, running ads part-time is a recipe for wasted money.
Product–Market Fit. Are there clear early signs of demand and retention? Ads are great for amplifying growth, but they cannot fix churn or low conversion rates.
If you answered yes to all three, congrats! You are ready to move on. Let’s start by breaking down each point in more detail.
Budget
Scaling on Meta Ads requires money, mostly ad spend and team salary. The core principle is simple: your Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) should be lower than your Lifetime Value (LTV).
If you are selling a one-time purchase product, paid marketing is often simpler. You can aim to break even or even profit on the first purchase, then reinvest those returns directly into more ads.
If you are running a subscription model, cash flow gets trickier. Most of your revenue comes over time, so you need enough upfront capital to cover ad spend while waiting for those subscriptions to pay back. Without that runway, scaling stalls quickly.
Know your cash needs upfront. Always model a downside case where ROAS stays far below break-even for the first three months. If the math still works, you’re in a safe spot to start.
Team
The ideal starting team setup in 2025 is a Performance Marketer + Creative Producer + Video Editor. This is also the first year you can skip having a dedicated Graphic Designer, since AI can now generate high-quality static ads at scale. Looking ahead, 2026 will likely be the first year you can run without a Video Editor as well.
At the $0–100K stage, some roles can be combined. A strong Performance Marketer can often act as both buyer and Creative Producer, outsourcing video editing until volume grows. What matters is not titles but ownership. Someone must fully own performance, someone must own creative, and both must work closely together.
In the early stages, founders often shape messaging, approve creatives, and track key numbers. Over time, they should step back from execution and let the team run, focusing on strategy and growth levers instead.
Product–Market Fit
The best advice here is to build something people actually want. If your product isn’t delivering value to its users, then it’s much harder to promote it profitably. Trust me, I speak from experience.
Before putting money into Meta, make sure monetization is set up and tested, and that you already know your first key product metrics such as retention, conversion, and LTV. A useful rule of thumb is to expect paid users to perform about 30% worse than organic users.
Meta lets you drive thousands of people to your website or app fast. Treat that traffic as a testing ground. Run A/B tests, track the numbers, and use the data to improve every step of your funnel. The faster you iterate, the higher you can scale.
Would you still be excited to spend $100K if paid users converted 30% worse than organic? If the answer is yes, you are in a strong place to grow.
Hiring
Before making your first hire, get advice from experienced Meta marketers or CMOs. Talk to someone who has scaled companies in your niche or close to it. They can give you realistic CAC benchmarks, working ad formats, and a sense of what your competitors are doing. If you do not know where to start, platforms like GrowthMentor are a useful resource (not an ad).
Performance Marketer
Your first key hire should be a Performance Marketer. This can be part-time or full-time depending on how fast you want to move. Look for someone who has already worked successfully with Meta Ads and is ready to take on more responsibility, starting from scratch with greater ownership and autonomy. This person should fully own your Meta Ads, setting up accounts, events, and integrations the right way.
Creative Producer
The Creative Producer should be your second hire. They are the bridge between performance and content, making sure you test enough formats, hooks, and concepts. A strong hire understands how to produce winning ads and can build effective ad production processes that keep the system learning. Hands-on experience with AI tools is essential in 2025, as this is the biggest trend in ad production and the key advantage you can have on Meta right now.
Common Mistakes to avoid
Hiring an intern as your first hire. They might be talented, but without experience they will not know how to set up from zero, navigate tracking, or troubleshoot when things break. You need someone who has already seen how Meta operates from the inside.
Hiring a general marketer instead of a Meta specialist. Someone with broad marketing skills but no real Meta Ads expertise will struggle to set things up quickly and correctly. Previous hands-on experience will save you money and increase your chances of success.
Outsourcing everything to an agency right away. Agencies are great once you already have a working system, but early on you should own your setup and learn the fundamentals. Otherwise, you will be dependent from day one and may not be able to move fast enough to stay competitive. I cover how to work successfully with agencies later in this playbook.
Meta Ads Setup
Technical implementation deserves its own post, since it’s too nuanced and big topic to cover in this playbook. You can find plenty of detailed guides online or simply ask ChatGPT. Here, I will just mention some tips to make the process smoother:
Verify your business details early (domain, business ID, payment method). Delays here can block your start for days.
Start with at least two ad accounts: one for active campaigns and one as backup. Account bans or payment issues still happen.
Use two-factor authentication for everyone with access to your ad accounts. Remind your team they may get scam emails about account bans or pro support. Always double-check domains.
Define one clear primary conversion event (purchase, subscription, signup). Use standard events and avoid custom ones.
While the Meta Pixel is enough to start, implement the Conversions API (CAPI) for your main conversion events once you reach $10K per month in spend. This provides Meta with cleaner data and improves targeting.
Creating Ads
Meta is a creative-first platform. The top 5% of ads capture ~80% of spend. To get there, you need both quantity and diversity of creative.
Creative is your biggest leverage on Meta, and also the biggest bottleneck for most companies. To find those winning 5% of ads, you need to treat creative production like a gold mine — launching dozens, hundreds, even thousands of variations guided by your performance data.
For perspective, some top mobile app advertisers launch 5,000+ ad variations every month. That sheer volume of testing is what sets them apart from dozens of competitors. That’s why building a system for consistent creative output is the foundation of scaling.
But don’t let that overwhelm you, this playbook is here to break it down and walk you through the main steps one by one.
Competitor Research
Before creating your own ads, study what your competitors are doing on Meta Ads. This gives you a baseline for what works in your market and helps you spot gaps you can exploit.
List your competitors. Write down at least 10 direct or indirect competitors.
Collect their ads. Use the Meta Ads Library, ad analytics tools, or Spiral to find and study their creatives.
Analyze their approach. Look at the balance between static and video, the ad formats they use, the audiences they seem to target, the emotional triggers in their messaging, and the headlines or hooks that stand out.
Document insights. Create a simple competitor ads file with screenshots, notes, and patterns you observe. This becomes your reference point for ideation and differentiation.
Don’t be afraid to adapt competitors’ ideas, it’s a proven route and often a great starting point. But the bigger wins come when you understand the creative language of your market and use it to shape your own value proposition.
Your Value Proposition
Your competitors are targeting the same audience you want to reach. This means your audience has probably already seen several ads promising solution close to yours. To win, especially in crowded markets, you cannot just repeat what others are saying. You need a distinct value proposition, a new angle or approach that cuts through the noise and gives people a reason to choose you over everyone else. Let’s cover this step by step:
Define the problems you solve. List the main functional and emotional problems your product addresses. Use the same language your current customers use, or even better, talk directly with them. The best approach is to identify why your current customers already chose your product. The more unique problems you solve, the broader your addressable audience.
Identify why it matters now. Explain the urgency and add context. Why is this a problem worth solving today? The stronger your “why now” the easier it is to win attention.
Craft your core promise. For each of the problems you listed, define the clear promise your product delivers. Boil it down to one simple sentence that explains what you do. Your core promise should be short, memorable, and strong enough to become the foundation of your ads. Example: “The easiest way to [do X] without [problem].”
Expand into key angles. Break each core promise into 3–4 different angles you can test in ads. Each angle highlights a specific benefit: saving money, saving time, reducing stress, looking better, unlocking fun, etc. Example: Save time → “10 minutes a day is enough to make progress.”
Layer on emotional triggers. Tie each angle to a feeling that motivates action: relief, excitement, pride, security, belonging. Logical benefits get attention, but emotions drive clicks and conversions. Check out the Life Force 8 framework to understand which emotional triggers drive people to act. Example: Save time → relief: “Finally, a method that fits into your busy life.”
When you combine these steps, you turn a generic product pitch into a sharp value proposition with multiple testable angles. The key is to make sure every ad speaks to both rational benefits and emotional triggers. Start with at least 20 different angles, then experiment and double down on what works. This is just your starting point.
Effective Process
Ad production is a weekly, repeatable process. To make it work, you need tight communication between marketers and creative producers, clear ownership of tasks, a weekly production plan, well-organized asset storage, and a structured system to keep everything moving.
Tips for building an effective ad production process:
Set a weekly target. Decide how many new ads you will produce each week and stick to it. Start small, then increase output by about 10% each week as your team gets more efficient. Consistency beats one-off bursts.
Review performance. Hold weekly or twice-weekly check-ins between performance and creative. Kill underperformers, scale winners, and feed learnings directly into the next briefs.
Repurpose systematically. Each concept should generate multiple variations. For video, test different hooks, models, lengths, and text overlays. For static, test different styles, headlines, and visual elements.
Double down on what works. Create variations of every winning concept. A single ad might last only a few months, but strong concepts can work for years. Produce both small tweaks and deeper reworks to keep performance alive.
Set a win rate target. When you are just starting out, aim for about 10% of your ad concepts (not variations) to become winners. As you scale, expect that rate to drop closer to 5%, since low-hanging fruits disappear and your bar for a “winner” gets much higher.
Centralize assets. Store footage, raw files, and finished ads in one shared place with clear naming rules. It saves hours every week.
Focus on the right aspect ratios. For static, use 1:1 or 4:5, and resize to 9:16 only for proven winners. For video, 9:16 is enough. Keep everything inside the central 4:5 safe zone and let Meta automatically crop for Feed.
Test fast, not perfect. Launch variations quickly. Real audience data beats internal debates, and speed helps you find winners before fatigue sets in.
Build a feedback loop. Document what worked and why. Over time this becomes your creative playbook.
At Spiral, we make this entire process easier and faster. We’ve built our tool with this experience inside, and some of the most time-consuming steps are automated. From generating variations to tracking results, Spiral lets your team focus on strategy and ideation.
Testing Ads
First, understand the philosophy behind testing. The goal is not to find a perfect ad right away, but to quickly learn which angles, hooks, and formats resonate with your audience. Think of testing as buying data, not just buying conversions. This phase is an investment into future scale. The insights you gain now compound later, the ads you scale will come from patterns you discover during testing.
How to structure testing campaings
Start by dividing all campaigns into testing campaigns and scaling campaigns. Inside testing campaigns, each ad set should represent one ad concept you want to test. Each ad concept should contain 3–6 ad variations. Sometimes it can be more or less, but sticking to this range keeps learning efficient.
By default, use budget per ad set. This ensures every ad concept gets spend and is tested. Some ads will not receive meaningful impressions, that is normal. Allocate small, controlled budgets per concept ($50–$250 daily).
Switch to budget per campaign with multiple new ad sets only in two cases:
You do not have a marketer monitoring campaign performance daily. This way, you avoid overspending on ads that clearly do not work.
Your testing budget is limited and you need to find a winner right now. You risk losing insights and overall performance long-tem, but it can surface a new winning ad faster.
Avoid uploading all new weekly ads on the same day. Too many new ads at once can destabilize performance. Add no more than 25% of your total active ads per day.
Metrics to track
When testing ads, look at different signals. Early signals tell you if an ad grabs attention, mid signals show whether that attention is qualified, and final decision metrics confirm if the ad is profitable.
Early signals: CTR, thumbstop rate, engagement rate, CPC. These help you filter quickly, if people are not stopping or clicking, the ad will not scale.
Mid signals: Click-to-conversion rate, cost per signup, trial, or add-to-cart. These show if the traffic you are buying is qualified and if your funnel is doing its job.
Final decision metrics: CAC and ROAS. These are what you ultimately scale on. Once an ad consistently reach or beats your benchmarks here, it becomes a winner.
How to interpret results:
If early signals are weak but mid signals are strong, you probably found the right problem to solve, but the creative is not catching attention. Iterate on hooks, angles, and emotional triggers to make the ad stop the scroll.
If early signals are strong but mid signals are weak, the ad grabs attention but fails to convert. This means the format, hook, or key angle works for engagement but does not clearly communicate your product’s value. Iterate on these elements to turn attention into conversions. Note: we are not covering cases where your website or app itself fails to convert users.
Common mistakes
Testing too few creatives. Without enough quantity and diversity, you will not generate reliable learnings. You need a steady pipeline of new concepts to increase your odds of finding winners.
Over-optimizing for CTR. High click-through rates can look promising but mean little if those clicks do not convert. CTR is the most important attention metric, but it is too far from revenue. I have seen many winning ads with CTR below 1% that scaled profitably because they converted those few clicks extremely well.
Iterating on too many things at once. When testing variations of a winning ad, only change one element at a time. Otherwise, you cannot know which change caused the performance shift.
Stop creative testing. Halting creative testing after finding a winning concept is one of the biggest mistakes that limits growth. Every ad fatigues. If you stop launching new ideas, costs rise and performance stalls.
Relying on one ad type. Leaning on a single format or style, even if it works, is another trap that caps growth. Without exploring new angles and emotional triggers, performance flattens. Diversity keeps the system learning and results improving.
Failing to document learnings. Without a simple record of what worked and why, your team will waste resources repeating old mistakes. Build a feedback loop where every test adds to your creative playbook.
Scaling Ads
Now that you’ve finished testing, you know what your CAC and ROAS look like. At this point you need to decide whether to scale, keep testing, or pause. A strong winner can often cut CAC in half, but do not expect miracles — getting 5x cheaper results after testing 20 concepts is rare.
Sometimes ROAS will be lower than you hoped, and that is completely normal. It usually means the product or funnel needs more work before Meta can become your growth engine. The good news is that every round of testing gives you valuable data you can use to improve landing pages, onboarding, monetization, and pricing.
If you have found potential winners, congratulations! You nailed the testing phase, and now you have the foundation to scale. Scaling is about building on those wins, increasing spend with confidence, and keeping CAC and ROAS steady as you grow.
Stop vs Scale
Stop
Kill an ad after spending ~3-7× your CAC if it’s below benchmarks.
Turn off the ad set after ~5-10× CAC if results are still far from target.
Grey Zone
If results are borderline, not bad enough to stop but not strong enough to scale, let the ad run longer. You could increase the ad set budget by 20%.
Use insights from these ads to iterate on creatives. Sometimes a small variation turns a near-miss into a winner.
Scale
Once an ad consistently meets or beats your targets and has 10+ conversions, move it into scaling campaigns.
Keep iterating on ads that you push into scaling.
How to structure scaling campaings
There’s no single “correct” way to scale. Some of my advice may even differ from Meta’s own playbook, which is why you should always test in your account and, ideally, get input from an experienced marketer in your niche.
My go-to setup: campaign-level budget with 1–4 ad sets per campaign and no more than 25 ads in total. Each ad set should combine static + video for diversity, and all traffic should go to the same landing page or app. Only run ads that are proven or strong potential winners. You can keep adding new creatives into a working campaign — but never touch the targeting.
Use the broadest targeting that makes sense for your product. Add limits only if it’s clearly necessary. For example, if you have historical data showing poor performance in certain countries, audiences, or placements. Otherwise, the general rule is: don’t limit Meta.
Remember that every campaign, ad set, and ad starts in the Learning Phase, where Meta tests to find the right audience. This phase ends after ~50 optimization events per ad set. Major edits (budget, targeting, optimization event) reset learning, so avoid big changes once a campaign is performing.
When a campaign is working, you have two ways to scale:
Duplicate the campaign. My preferred method. It lets you scale faster and more stably. You can duplicate exactly or make small tweaks in the copy.
Increase budget. Safe rule: raise by ~20% every 3 days, or 5–7% daily. Larger jumps almost always push the campaign back into learning and cause unstable results.
Most products perform better on weekends, so it’s common to scale campaigns before the weekend and pause poor-performing ones on Monday.
Audience Expansion
Expansion is one of the biggest levers for scaling because it unlocks new audiences. Once you’ve proven your ads work with a core audience, the fastest way to grow is by reaching people you haven’t tapped yet.
Ways to expand:
Geography. Test new countries or regions where your product can operate. Start with markets similar to your core audience in purchasing power and culture. Research local competition and regulations, and adjust pricing and payment methods to fit the market.
Language. Localize your product and ads into new languages. Even within the same country, native-language ads often outperform English. In my own campaigns, simply translating top English creatives into Spanish drove a 25% MRR lift in 1 month.
Demographics. Test new age groups or genders with tailored creatives or messaging. Even small shifts can reveal segments with lower CAC or higher LTV, then you could expand further by adapting or customizing your product further.
Problems and Promises. Explore new value propositions by highlighting different problems your product solves or alternate benefits it delivers. The more problems you can credibly solve, the broader your reach and the more durable your growth.
Creative Analysis
This is where you turn performance data into scaling decisions. The goal is not to look at every metric but to focus on the ones that directly drive CAC and ROAS.
At the scaling stage, monitor performance daily but make decisions every 2–3 days. Daily spikes can be misleading, while multi-day trends show whether ads are truly working.
Keep reports simple, less is often more. Whenever possible, set them up to run automatically, whether through a Google Sheets script or an external tool. If automation isn’t an option, it’s worth asking if the data is truly essential. Manual reporting can take up a lot of time and energy that’s better spent on insights and action.
The real value of analysis is spotting patterns: which concepts keep winning, which creatives fatigue fastest, how CAC moves as you raise budgets, and which campaigns stay efficient at scale. Feed these insights directly into your creative pipeline so each new batch of ads has a higher chance of success.
How to work with Agencies
Working with agencies can be a powerful lever, but only if you approach it the right way. Treat agencies as partners, not magicians. They can bring fresh ideas and extra capacity, but they can’t fix a weak product or broken funnel.
Start by booking calls with multiple agencies that have proven success in your industry or with your competitors. If you don’t know where to begin, Clutch is a useful directory (not an ad). Choose agencies that understand your marketing goals, run smooth briefing process, offer clear pricing, and most importantly — earn your trust.
Agencies generally fall into two categories. Below I’ll share how to work with both and give practical tips for building strong partnerships. In my case, only about 1 in 5 pilots has turned into a long-term relationship, so it’s smart to test multiple agencies in parallel to find the right fit.
Ad production agencies
This type of agency can be useful at any stage. They help bring in new creative formats, boost output, and add diversity to your testing pool. That said, never rely on agencies alone. You need in-house production to double down on winners. Agencies bring fresh ideas, but only your own team can iterate fast enough to scale.
Most agencies charge per creative asset. A setup I like is running two sprints per month: every two weeks the agency delivers a set number of ad concepts, you test them, then return with performance data. This rhythm keeps output consistent and ensures you’re learning quickly.
To make the relationship work, build a data flywheel. Share your creative insights, audience learnings, and internal data so the agency can refine concepts and deliver stronger ads over time. Review results and give feedback every two weeks to close the loop before the next batch.
Another best practice is to work with a local agency when entering a new language or geography. They bring market expertise that speeds up your launch, and you’ll learn from them as you build your own playbook.
Pefrormance Agencies
Bring in performance agencies only once you already have some scale and solid historical data to guide negotiations. Usually after you’re spending at least $30K per month. Without that data, you’ll have no leverage, and most agencies will treat you as an easy client to bill rather than a long-term partner to grow with.
At this stage, the right agency can give you leverage to grow faster, especially when incentives are aligned. The best setups tie compensation to revenue or profit share, not flat fees.
I recommend working only with agencies that produce their own creatives and cover ad production costs on their side. This lets you learn from their winning concepts without risking them reusing or copying your ads, which would put you in direct competition for the same audience.
To set them up for success, share key data: your top-performing ad concepts, the demographics that convert best, and the essentials about your product. This ensures they produce the right creatives and configure their ad accounts correctly. Always request read access to those ad accounts for full transparency.
Discuss target KPIs and campaign limits before you start. Be clear on what CAC or ROAS is acceptable for you. For pilots, I recommend setting guardrails to make sure they focus on high-quality audiences. Once they prove they can deliver results, you can relax those limits so they have more room to scale.
Knowing when to stop working with an agency is just as important as knowing when to hire one. Agencies should be true growth partners — proactive in testing, iterating, and scaling. The right ones create leverage and open new opportunities, the wrong ones drain budget and slow you down. Once you see the relationship isn’t adding value, cut ties quickly. But if you’ve found a long-term growth partner, congratulations!
What’s next
AI is changing how ads are made and will keep reshaping the game. On Meta, your job is to compete for attention and sell solutions to people’s needs. Teams that adopt AI tools today move faster, test more ideas, and adapt quicker than those still stuck in manual workflows. Staying ahead here isn’t optional, it’s your survival and competitive edge.
Start simple and move fast. The path forward is about momentum, not perfection. Keep launching, keep learning, and keep feeding the system with fresh ideas. Each round of testing sharpens your edge, and each win builds a stronger foundation for the next.
Every product and team scales differently. Meta is never a straight path — too many variables, too many things outside your control. What I’ve shared here comes from 7 years of trial and error, and my hope is that it puts you a few steps ahead.
Thanks for reading. I’m grateful you spent your time here, and I’d love to hear how your journey goes. You can always reach me at sasha@spiral.ad
Scaling Meta Ads in 2025 Playbook
20 min
Spiral Team
Aug 28, 2025
From $0 to $100K a month, profitably
Most teams never break $100K a month on Meta. Why? Scaling on Meta can feel messy, with lots of moving parts and real pressure to hit targets. Budgets climb, CAC swings, and plenty can go wrong. I’ve been there, and I know how stressful it can get.
I’m Sasha, co-founder at Spiral.ad, and I have spent 7 years running Meta campaigns with more than $20M in spend across ecommerce, streaming platforms, and subscription apps. In this guide I share exactly how I would take a product from 0 to $100K/month by profitably scaling Meta Ads. I am not covering what comes after $100K. If you reach that point, well done. You will know your own playbook better than any outside guide.
This playbook is written with B2C digital products in mind, that’s where I’ve spent most of my career. One important note: there’s no universal formula for Meta Ads, but here’s how I’d approach it if I were launching my own product today. It’s distilled from 7 years of hands-on experience with the platform.
The state of Meta in 2025
Meta doesn’t work the way it did 5 years ago. Back then, targeting hacks and micro-optimizations were the main levers. Today, the system is smarter and heavier lifting happens on a creative side. Here are the key shifts to understand before starting:
Creative is the new targeting. Meta analyzes your ad content — text, visuals, audio — and uses it to figure out who should see it. A single great creative can outperform the best custom audience.
Broad is the default. Advantage+ campaigns and wide audiences consistently beat stacked interest targeting. The system needs room to learn.
Signal quality matters more than hacks. Clean Conversions API setup, deduplicated events, and stable conversion definitions are what keep performance consistent. Weak signals equal unstable CAC.
Creative diversity prevents fatigue. Short video is dominant, but static still works. Mixing formats, hooks, and angles keeps campaigns alive longer.
The formula for scaling in 2025 = quantity × diversity of ads. Growth comes from consistently feeding the system fresh inputs and letting it learn.
The Foundation for Scaling
Before we dive deeper, let’s do a quick check-up to see if Meta Ads is the right move for you right now. In many cases, I’d actually recommend focusing on other channels first. Here’s the checklist:
Budget. Do you have at least $10K/month to test? You need enough conversions for the system to learn. If you’re below that, consider other channels that are less capital-intensive.
Team. Can you dedicate at least one person to own your Meta Ads? Scaling isn’t a side project, running ads part-time is a recipe for wasted money.
Product–Market Fit. Are there clear early signs of demand and retention? Ads are great for amplifying growth, but they cannot fix churn or low conversion rates.
If you answered yes to all three, congrats! You are ready to move on. Let’s start by breaking down each point in more detail.
Budget
Scaling on Meta Ads requires money, mostly ad spend and team salary. The core principle is simple: your Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) should be lower than your Lifetime Value (LTV).
If you are selling a one-time purchase product, paid marketing is often simpler. You can aim to break even or even profit on the first purchase, then reinvest those returns directly into more ads.
If you are running a subscription model, cash flow gets trickier. Most of your revenue comes over time, so you need enough upfront capital to cover ad spend while waiting for those subscriptions to pay back. Without that runway, scaling stalls quickly.
Know your cash needs upfront. Always model a downside case where ROAS stays far below break-even for the first three months. If the math still works, you’re in a safe spot to start.
Team
The ideal starting team setup in 2025 is a Performance Marketer + Creative Producer + Video Editor. This is also the first year you can skip having a dedicated Graphic Designer, since AI can now generate high-quality static ads at scale. Looking ahead, 2026 will likely be the first year you can run without a Video Editor as well.
At the $0–100K stage, some roles can be combined. A strong Performance Marketer can often act as both buyer and Creative Producer, outsourcing video editing until volume grows. What matters is not titles but ownership. Someone must fully own performance, someone must own creative, and both must work closely together.
In the early stages, founders often shape messaging, approve creatives, and track key numbers. Over time, they should step back from execution and let the team run, focusing on strategy and growth levers instead.
Product–Market Fit
The best advice here is to build something people actually want. If your product isn’t delivering value to its users, then it’s much harder to promote it profitably. Trust me, I speak from experience.
Before putting money into Meta, make sure monetization is set up and tested, and that you already know your first key product metrics such as retention, conversion, and LTV. A useful rule of thumb is to expect paid users to perform about 30% worse than organic users.
Meta lets you drive thousands of people to your website or app fast. Treat that traffic as a testing ground. Run A/B tests, track the numbers, and use the data to improve every step of your funnel. The faster you iterate, the higher you can scale.
Would you still be excited to spend $100K if paid users converted 30% worse than organic? If the answer is yes, you are in a strong place to grow.
Hiring
Before making your first hire, get advice from experienced Meta marketers or CMOs. Talk to someone who has scaled companies in your niche or close to it. They can give you realistic CAC benchmarks, working ad formats, and a sense of what your competitors are doing. If you do not know where to start, platforms like GrowthMentor are a useful resource (not an ad).
Performance Marketer
Your first key hire should be a Performance Marketer. This can be part-time or full-time depending on how fast you want to move. Look for someone who has already worked successfully with Meta Ads and is ready to take on more responsibility, starting from scratch with greater ownership and autonomy. This person should fully own your Meta Ads, setting up accounts, events, and integrations the right way.
Creative Producer
The Creative Producer should be your second hire. They are the bridge between performance and content, making sure you test enough formats, hooks, and concepts. A strong hire understands how to produce winning ads and can build effective ad production processes that keep the system learning. Hands-on experience with AI tools is essential in 2025, as this is the biggest trend in ad production and the key advantage you can have on Meta right now.
Common Mistakes to avoid
Hiring an intern as your first hire. They might be talented, but without experience they will not know how to set up from zero, navigate tracking, or troubleshoot when things break. You need someone who has already seen how Meta operates from the inside.
Hiring a general marketer instead of a Meta specialist. Someone with broad marketing skills but no real Meta Ads expertise will struggle to set things up quickly and correctly. Previous hands-on experience will save you money and increase your chances of success.
Outsourcing everything to an agency right away. Agencies are great once you already have a working system, but early on you should own your setup and learn the fundamentals. Otherwise, you will be dependent from day one and may not be able to move fast enough to stay competitive. I cover how to work successfully with agencies later in this playbook.
Meta Ads Setup
Technical implementation deserves its own post, since it’s too nuanced and big topic to cover in this playbook. You can find plenty of detailed guides online or simply ask ChatGPT. Here, I will just mention some tips to make the process smoother:
Verify your business details early (domain, business ID, payment method). Delays here can block your start for days.
Start with at least two ad accounts: one for active campaigns and one as backup. Account bans or payment issues still happen.
Use two-factor authentication for everyone with access to your ad accounts. Remind your team they may get scam emails about account bans or pro support. Always double-check domains.
Define one clear primary conversion event (purchase, subscription, signup). Use standard events and avoid custom ones.
While the Meta Pixel is enough to start, implement the Conversions API (CAPI) for your main conversion events once you reach $10K per month in spend. This provides Meta with cleaner data and improves targeting.
Creating Ads
Meta is a creative-first platform. The top 5% of ads capture ~80% of spend. To get there, you need both quantity and diversity of creative.
Creative is your biggest leverage on Meta, and also the biggest bottleneck for most companies. To find those winning 5% of ads, you need to treat creative production like a gold mine — launching dozens, hundreds, even thousands of variations guided by your performance data.
For perspective, some top mobile app advertisers launch 5,000+ ad variations every month. That sheer volume of testing is what sets them apart from dozens of competitors. That’s why building a system for consistent creative output is the foundation of scaling.
But don’t let that overwhelm you, this playbook is here to break it down and walk you through the main steps one by one.
Competitor Research
Before creating your own ads, study what your competitors are doing on Meta Ads. This gives you a baseline for what works in your market and helps you spot gaps you can exploit.
List your competitors. Write down at least 10 direct or indirect competitors.
Collect their ads. Use the Meta Ads Library, ad analytics tools, or Spiral to find and study their creatives.
Analyze their approach. Look at the balance between static and video, the ad formats they use, the audiences they seem to target, the emotional triggers in their messaging, and the headlines or hooks that stand out.
Document insights. Create a simple competitor ads file with screenshots, notes, and patterns you observe. This becomes your reference point for ideation and differentiation.
Don’t be afraid to adapt competitors’ ideas, it’s a proven route and often a great starting point. But the bigger wins come when you understand the creative language of your market and use it to shape your own value proposition.
Your Value Proposition
Your competitors are targeting the same audience you want to reach. This means your audience has probably already seen several ads promising solution close to yours. To win, especially in crowded markets, you cannot just repeat what others are saying. You need a distinct value proposition, a new angle or approach that cuts through the noise and gives people a reason to choose you over everyone else. Let’s cover this step by step:
Define the problems you solve. List the main functional and emotional problems your product addresses. Use the same language your current customers use, or even better, talk directly with them. The best approach is to identify why your current customers already chose your product. The more unique problems you solve, the broader your addressable audience.
Identify why it matters now. Explain the urgency and add context. Why is this a problem worth solving today? The stronger your “why now” the easier it is to win attention.
Craft your core promise. For each of the problems you listed, define the clear promise your product delivers. Boil it down to one simple sentence that explains what you do. Your core promise should be short, memorable, and strong enough to become the foundation of your ads. Example: “The easiest way to [do X] without [problem].”
Expand into key angles. Break each core promise into 3–4 different angles you can test in ads. Each angle highlights a specific benefit: saving money, saving time, reducing stress, looking better, unlocking fun, etc. Example: Save time → “10 minutes a day is enough to make progress.”
Layer on emotional triggers. Tie each angle to a feeling that motivates action: relief, excitement, pride, security, belonging. Logical benefits get attention, but emotions drive clicks and conversions. Check out the Life Force 8 framework to understand which emotional triggers drive people to act. Example: Save time → relief: “Finally, a method that fits into your busy life.”
When you combine these steps, you turn a generic product pitch into a sharp value proposition with multiple testable angles. The key is to make sure every ad speaks to both rational benefits and emotional triggers. Start with at least 20 different angles, then experiment and double down on what works. This is just your starting point.
Effective Process
Ad production is a weekly, repeatable process. To make it work, you need tight communication between marketers and creative producers, clear ownership of tasks, a weekly production plan, well-organized asset storage, and a structured system to keep everything moving.
Tips for building an effective ad production process:
Set a weekly target. Decide how many new ads you will produce each week and stick to it. Start small, then increase output by about 10% each week as your team gets more efficient. Consistency beats one-off bursts.
Review performance. Hold weekly or twice-weekly check-ins between performance and creative. Kill underperformers, scale winners, and feed learnings directly into the next briefs.
Repurpose systematically. Each concept should generate multiple variations. For video, test different hooks, models, lengths, and text overlays. For static, test different styles, headlines, and visual elements.
Double down on what works. Create variations of every winning concept. A single ad might last only a few months, but strong concepts can work for years. Produce both small tweaks and deeper reworks to keep performance alive.
Set a win rate target. When you are just starting out, aim for about 10% of your ad concepts (not variations) to become winners. As you scale, expect that rate to drop closer to 5%, since low-hanging fruits disappear and your bar for a “winner” gets much higher.
Centralize assets. Store footage, raw files, and finished ads in one shared place with clear naming rules. It saves hours every week.
Focus on the right aspect ratios. For static, use 1:1 or 4:5, and resize to 9:16 only for proven winners. For video, 9:16 is enough. Keep everything inside the central 4:5 safe zone and let Meta automatically crop for Feed.
Test fast, not perfect. Launch variations quickly. Real audience data beats internal debates, and speed helps you find winners before fatigue sets in.
Build a feedback loop. Document what worked and why. Over time this becomes your creative playbook.
At Spiral, we make this entire process easier and faster. We’ve built our tool with this experience inside, and some of the most time-consuming steps are automated. From generating variations to tracking results, Spiral lets your team focus on strategy and ideation.
Testing Ads
First, understand the philosophy behind testing. The goal is not to find a perfect ad right away, but to quickly learn which angles, hooks, and formats resonate with your audience. Think of testing as buying data, not just buying conversions. This phase is an investment into future scale. The insights you gain now compound later, the ads you scale will come from patterns you discover during testing.
How to structure testing campaings
Start by dividing all campaigns into testing campaigns and scaling campaigns. Inside testing campaigns, each ad set should represent one ad concept you want to test. Each ad concept should contain 3–6 ad variations. Sometimes it can be more or less, but sticking to this range keeps learning efficient.
By default, use budget per ad set. This ensures every ad concept gets spend and is tested. Some ads will not receive meaningful impressions, that is normal. Allocate small, controlled budgets per concept ($50–$250 daily).
Switch to budget per campaign with multiple new ad sets only in two cases:
You do not have a marketer monitoring campaign performance daily. This way, you avoid overspending on ads that clearly do not work.
Your testing budget is limited and you need to find a winner right now. You risk losing insights and overall performance long-tem, but it can surface a new winning ad faster.
Avoid uploading all new weekly ads on the same day. Too many new ads at once can destabilize performance. Add no more than 25% of your total active ads per day.
Metrics to track
When testing ads, look at different signals. Early signals tell you if an ad grabs attention, mid signals show whether that attention is qualified, and final decision metrics confirm if the ad is profitable.
Early signals: CTR, thumbstop rate, engagement rate, CPC. These help you filter quickly, if people are not stopping or clicking, the ad will not scale.
Mid signals: Click-to-conversion rate, cost per signup, trial, or add-to-cart. These show if the traffic you are buying is qualified and if your funnel is doing its job.
Final decision metrics: CAC and ROAS. These are what you ultimately scale on. Once an ad consistently reach or beats your benchmarks here, it becomes a winner.
How to interpret results:
If early signals are weak but mid signals are strong, you probably found the right problem to solve, but the creative is not catching attention. Iterate on hooks, angles, and emotional triggers to make the ad stop the scroll.
If early signals are strong but mid signals are weak, the ad grabs attention but fails to convert. This means the format, hook, or key angle works for engagement but does not clearly communicate your product’s value. Iterate on these elements to turn attention into conversions. Note: we are not covering cases where your website or app itself fails to convert users.
Common mistakes
Testing too few creatives. Without enough quantity and diversity, you will not generate reliable learnings. You need a steady pipeline of new concepts to increase your odds of finding winners.
Over-optimizing for CTR. High click-through rates can look promising but mean little if those clicks do not convert. CTR is the most important attention metric, but it is too far from revenue. I have seen many winning ads with CTR below 1% that scaled profitably because they converted those few clicks extremely well.
Iterating on too many things at once. When testing variations of a winning ad, only change one element at a time. Otherwise, you cannot know which change caused the performance shift.
Stop creative testing. Halting creative testing after finding a winning concept is one of the biggest mistakes that limits growth. Every ad fatigues. If you stop launching new ideas, costs rise and performance stalls.
Relying on one ad type. Leaning on a single format or style, even if it works, is another trap that caps growth. Without exploring new angles and emotional triggers, performance flattens. Diversity keeps the system learning and results improving.
Failing to document learnings. Without a simple record of what worked and why, your team will waste resources repeating old mistakes. Build a feedback loop where every test adds to your creative playbook.
Scaling Ads
Now that you’ve finished testing, you know what your CAC and ROAS look like. At this point you need to decide whether to scale, keep testing, or pause. A strong winner can often cut CAC in half, but do not expect miracles — getting 5x cheaper results after testing 20 concepts is rare.
Sometimes ROAS will be lower than you hoped, and that is completely normal. It usually means the product or funnel needs more work before Meta can become your growth engine. The good news is that every round of testing gives you valuable data you can use to improve landing pages, onboarding, monetization, and pricing.
If you have found potential winners, congratulations! You nailed the testing phase, and now you have the foundation to scale. Scaling is about building on those wins, increasing spend with confidence, and keeping CAC and ROAS steady as you grow.
Stop vs Scale
Stop
Kill an ad after spending ~3-7× your CAC if it’s below benchmarks.
Turn off the ad set after ~5-10× CAC if results are still far from target.
Grey Zone
If results are borderline, not bad enough to stop but not strong enough to scale, let the ad run longer. You could increase the ad set budget by 20%.
Use insights from these ads to iterate on creatives. Sometimes a small variation turns a near-miss into a winner.
Scale
Once an ad consistently meets or beats your targets and has 10+ conversions, move it into scaling campaigns.
Keep iterating on ads that you push into scaling.
How to structure scaling campaings
There’s no single “correct” way to scale. Some of my advice may even differ from Meta’s own playbook, which is why you should always test in your account and, ideally, get input from an experienced marketer in your niche.
My go-to setup: campaign-level budget with 1–4 ad sets per campaign and no more than 25 ads in total. Each ad set should combine static + video for diversity, and all traffic should go to the same landing page or app. Only run ads that are proven or strong potential winners. You can keep adding new creatives into a working campaign — but never touch the targeting.
Use the broadest targeting that makes sense for your product. Add limits only if it’s clearly necessary. For example, if you have historical data showing poor performance in certain countries, audiences, or placements. Otherwise, the general rule is: don’t limit Meta.
Remember that every campaign, ad set, and ad starts in the Learning Phase, where Meta tests to find the right audience. This phase ends after ~50 optimization events per ad set. Major edits (budget, targeting, optimization event) reset learning, so avoid big changes once a campaign is performing.
When a campaign is working, you have two ways to scale:
Duplicate the campaign. My preferred method. It lets you scale faster and more stably. You can duplicate exactly or make small tweaks in the copy.
Increase budget. Safe rule: raise by ~20% every 3 days, or 5–7% daily. Larger jumps almost always push the campaign back into learning and cause unstable results.
Most products perform better on weekends, so it’s common to scale campaigns before the weekend and pause poor-performing ones on Monday.
Audience Expansion
Expansion is one of the biggest levers for scaling because it unlocks new audiences. Once you’ve proven your ads work with a core audience, the fastest way to grow is by reaching people you haven’t tapped yet.
Ways to expand:
Geography. Test new countries or regions where your product can operate. Start with markets similar to your core audience in purchasing power and culture. Research local competition and regulations, and adjust pricing and payment methods to fit the market.
Language. Localize your product and ads into new languages. Even within the same country, native-language ads often outperform English. In my own campaigns, simply translating top English creatives into Spanish drove a 25% MRR lift in 1 month.
Demographics. Test new age groups or genders with tailored creatives or messaging. Even small shifts can reveal segments with lower CAC or higher LTV, then you could expand further by adapting or customizing your product further.
Problems and Promises. Explore new value propositions by highlighting different problems your product solves or alternate benefits it delivers. The more problems you can credibly solve, the broader your reach and the more durable your growth.
Creative Analysis
This is where you turn performance data into scaling decisions. The goal is not to look at every metric but to focus on the ones that directly drive CAC and ROAS.
At the scaling stage, monitor performance daily but make decisions every 2–3 days. Daily spikes can be misleading, while multi-day trends show whether ads are truly working.
Keep reports simple, less is often more. Whenever possible, set them up to run automatically, whether through a Google Sheets script or an external tool. If automation isn’t an option, it’s worth asking if the data is truly essential. Manual reporting can take up a lot of time and energy that’s better spent on insights and action.
The real value of analysis is spotting patterns: which concepts keep winning, which creatives fatigue fastest, how CAC moves as you raise budgets, and which campaigns stay efficient at scale. Feed these insights directly into your creative pipeline so each new batch of ads has a higher chance of success.
How to work with Agencies
Working with agencies can be a powerful lever, but only if you approach it the right way. Treat agencies as partners, not magicians. They can bring fresh ideas and extra capacity, but they can’t fix a weak product or broken funnel.
Start by booking calls with multiple agencies that have proven success in your industry or with your competitors. If you don’t know where to begin, Clutch is a useful directory (not an ad). Choose agencies that understand your marketing goals, run smooth briefing process, offer clear pricing, and most importantly — earn your trust.
Agencies generally fall into two categories. Below I’ll share how to work with both and give practical tips for building strong partnerships. In my case, only about 1 in 5 pilots has turned into a long-term relationship, so it’s smart to test multiple agencies in parallel to find the right fit.
Ad production agencies
This type of agency can be useful at any stage. They help bring in new creative formats, boost output, and add diversity to your testing pool. That said, never rely on agencies alone. You need in-house production to double down on winners. Agencies bring fresh ideas, but only your own team can iterate fast enough to scale.
Most agencies charge per creative asset. A setup I like is running two sprints per month: every two weeks the agency delivers a set number of ad concepts, you test them, then return with performance data. This rhythm keeps output consistent and ensures you’re learning quickly.
To make the relationship work, build a data flywheel. Share your creative insights, audience learnings, and internal data so the agency can refine concepts and deliver stronger ads over time. Review results and give feedback every two weeks to close the loop before the next batch.
Another best practice is to work with a local agency when entering a new language or geography. They bring market expertise that speeds up your launch, and you’ll learn from them as you build your own playbook.
Pefrormance Agencies
Bring in performance agencies only once you already have some scale and solid historical data to guide negotiations. Usually after you’re spending at least $30K per month. Without that data, you’ll have no leverage, and most agencies will treat you as an easy client to bill rather than a long-term partner to grow with.
At this stage, the right agency can give you leverage to grow faster, especially when incentives are aligned. The best setups tie compensation to revenue or profit share, not flat fees.
I recommend working only with agencies that produce their own creatives and cover ad production costs on their side. This lets you learn from their winning concepts without risking them reusing or copying your ads, which would put you in direct competition for the same audience.
To set them up for success, share key data: your top-performing ad concepts, the demographics that convert best, and the essentials about your product. This ensures they produce the right creatives and configure their ad accounts correctly. Always request read access to those ad accounts for full transparency.
Discuss target KPIs and campaign limits before you start. Be clear on what CAC or ROAS is acceptable for you. For pilots, I recommend setting guardrails to make sure they focus on high-quality audiences. Once they prove they can deliver results, you can relax those limits so they have more room to scale.
Knowing when to stop working with an agency is just as important as knowing when to hire one. Agencies should be true growth partners — proactive in testing, iterating, and scaling. The right ones create leverage and open new opportunities, the wrong ones drain budget and slow you down. Once you see the relationship isn’t adding value, cut ties quickly. But if you’ve found a long-term growth partner, congratulations!
What’s next
AI is changing how ads are made and will keep reshaping the game. On Meta, your job is to compete for attention and sell solutions to people’s needs. Teams that adopt AI tools today move faster, test more ideas, and adapt quicker than those still stuck in manual workflows. Staying ahead here isn’t optional, it’s your survival and competitive edge.
Start simple and move fast. The path forward is about momentum, not perfection. Keep launching, keep learning, and keep feeding the system with fresh ideas. Each round of testing sharpens your edge, and each win builds a stronger foundation for the next.
Every product and team scales differently. Meta is never a straight path — too many variables, too many things outside your control. What I’ve shared here comes from 7 years of trial and error, and my hope is that it puts you a few steps ahead.
Thanks for reading. I’m grateful you spent your time here, and I’d love to hear how your journey goes. You can always reach me at sasha@spiral.ad
Scaling Meta Ads in 2025 Playbook
20 min
Spiral Team
Aug 28, 2025
From $0 to $100K a month, profitably
Most teams never break $100K a month on Meta. Why? Scaling on Meta can feel messy, with lots of moving parts and real pressure to hit targets. Budgets climb, CAC swings, and plenty can go wrong. I’ve been there, and I know how stressful it can get.
I’m Sasha, co-founder at Spiral.ad, and I have spent 7 years running Meta campaigns with more than $20M in spend across ecommerce, streaming platforms, and subscription apps. In this guide I share exactly how I would take a product from 0 to $100K/month by profitably scaling Meta Ads. I am not covering what comes after $100K. If you reach that point, well done. You will know your own playbook better than any outside guide.
This playbook is written with B2C digital products in mind, that’s where I’ve spent most of my career. One important note: there’s no universal formula for Meta Ads, but here’s how I’d approach it if I were launching my own product today. It’s distilled from 7 years of hands-on experience with the platform.
The state of Meta in 2025
Meta doesn’t work the way it did 5 years ago. Back then, targeting hacks and micro-optimizations were the main levers. Today, the system is smarter and heavier lifting happens on a creative side. Here are the key shifts to understand before starting:
Creative is the new targeting. Meta analyzes your ad content — text, visuals, audio — and uses it to figure out who should see it. A single great creative can outperform the best custom audience.
Broad is the default. Advantage+ campaigns and wide audiences consistently beat stacked interest targeting. The system needs room to learn.
Signal quality matters more than hacks. Clean Conversions API setup, deduplicated events, and stable conversion definitions are what keep performance consistent. Weak signals equal unstable CAC.
Creative diversity prevents fatigue. Short video is dominant, but static still works. Mixing formats, hooks, and angles keeps campaigns alive longer.
The formula for scaling in 2025 = quantity × diversity of ads. Growth comes from consistently feeding the system fresh inputs and letting it learn.
The Foundation for Scaling
Before we dive deeper, let’s do a quick check-up to see if Meta Ads is the right move for you right now. In many cases, I’d actually recommend focusing on other channels first. Here’s the checklist:
Budget. Do you have at least $10K/month to test? You need enough conversions for the system to learn. If you’re below that, consider other channels that are less capital-intensive.
Team. Can you dedicate at least one person to own your Meta Ads? Scaling isn’t a side project, running ads part-time is a recipe for wasted money.
Product–Market Fit. Are there clear early signs of demand and retention? Ads are great for amplifying growth, but they cannot fix churn or low conversion rates.
If you answered yes to all three, congrats! You are ready to move on. Let’s start by breaking down each point in more detail.
Budget
Scaling on Meta Ads requires money, mostly ad spend and team salary. The core principle is simple: your Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) should be lower than your Lifetime Value (LTV).
If you are selling a one-time purchase product, paid marketing is often simpler. You can aim to break even or even profit on the first purchase, then reinvest those returns directly into more ads.
If you are running a subscription model, cash flow gets trickier. Most of your revenue comes over time, so you need enough upfront capital to cover ad spend while waiting for those subscriptions to pay back. Without that runway, scaling stalls quickly.
Know your cash needs upfront. Always model a downside case where ROAS stays far below break-even for the first three months. If the math still works, you’re in a safe spot to start.
Team
The ideal starting team setup in 2025 is a Performance Marketer + Creative Producer + Video Editor. This is also the first year you can skip having a dedicated Graphic Designer, since AI can now generate high-quality static ads at scale. Looking ahead, 2026 will likely be the first year you can run without a Video Editor as well.
At the $0–100K stage, some roles can be combined. A strong Performance Marketer can often act as both buyer and Creative Producer, outsourcing video editing until volume grows. What matters is not titles but ownership. Someone must fully own performance, someone must own creative, and both must work closely together.
In the early stages, founders often shape messaging, approve creatives, and track key numbers. Over time, they should step back from execution and let the team run, focusing on strategy and growth levers instead.
Product–Market Fit
The best advice here is to build something people actually want. If your product isn’t delivering value to its users, then it’s much harder to promote it profitably. Trust me, I speak from experience.
Before putting money into Meta, make sure monetization is set up and tested, and that you already know your first key product metrics such as retention, conversion, and LTV. A useful rule of thumb is to expect paid users to perform about 30% worse than organic users.
Meta lets you drive thousands of people to your website or app fast. Treat that traffic as a testing ground. Run A/B tests, track the numbers, and use the data to improve every step of your funnel. The faster you iterate, the higher you can scale.
Would you still be excited to spend $100K if paid users converted 30% worse than organic? If the answer is yes, you are in a strong place to grow.
Hiring
Before making your first hire, get advice from experienced Meta marketers or CMOs. Talk to someone who has scaled companies in your niche or close to it. They can give you realistic CAC benchmarks, working ad formats, and a sense of what your competitors are doing. If you do not know where to start, platforms like GrowthMentor are a useful resource (not an ad).
Performance Marketer
Your first key hire should be a Performance Marketer. This can be part-time or full-time depending on how fast you want to move. Look for someone who has already worked successfully with Meta Ads and is ready to take on more responsibility, starting from scratch with greater ownership and autonomy. This person should fully own your Meta Ads, setting up accounts, events, and integrations the right way.
Creative Producer
The Creative Producer should be your second hire. They are the bridge between performance and content, making sure you test enough formats, hooks, and concepts. A strong hire understands how to produce winning ads and can build effective ad production processes that keep the system learning. Hands-on experience with AI tools is essential in 2025, as this is the biggest trend in ad production and the key advantage you can have on Meta right now.
Common Mistakes to avoid
Hiring an intern as your first hire. They might be talented, but without experience they will not know how to set up from zero, navigate tracking, or troubleshoot when things break. You need someone who has already seen how Meta operates from the inside.
Hiring a general marketer instead of a Meta specialist. Someone with broad marketing skills but no real Meta Ads expertise will struggle to set things up quickly and correctly. Previous hands-on experience will save you money and increase your chances of success.
Outsourcing everything to an agency right away. Agencies are great once you already have a working system, but early on you should own your setup and learn the fundamentals. Otherwise, you will be dependent from day one and may not be able to move fast enough to stay competitive. I cover how to work successfully with agencies later in this playbook.
Meta Ads Setup
Technical implementation deserves its own post, since it’s too nuanced and big topic to cover in this playbook. You can find plenty of detailed guides online or simply ask ChatGPT. Here, I will just mention some tips to make the process smoother:
Verify your business details early (domain, business ID, payment method). Delays here can block your start for days.
Start with at least two ad accounts: one for active campaigns and one as backup. Account bans or payment issues still happen.
Use two-factor authentication for everyone with access to your ad accounts. Remind your team they may get scam emails about account bans or pro support. Always double-check domains.
Define one clear primary conversion event (purchase, subscription, signup). Use standard events and avoid custom ones.
While the Meta Pixel is enough to start, implement the Conversions API (CAPI) for your main conversion events once you reach $10K per month in spend. This provides Meta with cleaner data and improves targeting.
Creating Ads
Meta is a creative-first platform. The top 5% of ads capture ~80% of spend. To get there, you need both quantity and diversity of creative.
Creative is your biggest leverage on Meta, and also the biggest bottleneck for most companies. To find those winning 5% of ads, you need to treat creative production like a gold mine — launching dozens, hundreds, even thousands of variations guided by your performance data.
For perspective, some top mobile app advertisers launch 5,000+ ad variations every month. That sheer volume of testing is what sets them apart from dozens of competitors. That’s why building a system for consistent creative output is the foundation of scaling.
But don’t let that overwhelm you, this playbook is here to break it down and walk you through the main steps one by one.
Competitor Research
Before creating your own ads, study what your competitors are doing on Meta Ads. This gives you a baseline for what works in your market and helps you spot gaps you can exploit.
List your competitors. Write down at least 10 direct or indirect competitors.
Collect their ads. Use the Meta Ads Library, ad analytics tools, or Spiral to find and study their creatives.
Analyze their approach. Look at the balance between static and video, the ad formats they use, the audiences they seem to target, the emotional triggers in their messaging, and the headlines or hooks that stand out.
Document insights. Create a simple competitor ads file with screenshots, notes, and patterns you observe. This becomes your reference point for ideation and differentiation.
Don’t be afraid to adapt competitors’ ideas, it’s a proven route and often a great starting point. But the bigger wins come when you understand the creative language of your market and use it to shape your own value proposition.
Your Value Proposition
Your competitors are targeting the same audience you want to reach. This means your audience has probably already seen several ads promising solution close to yours. To win, especially in crowded markets, you cannot just repeat what others are saying. You need a distinct value proposition, a new angle or approach that cuts through the noise and gives people a reason to choose you over everyone else. Let’s cover this step by step:
Define the problems you solve. List the main functional and emotional problems your product addresses. Use the same language your current customers use, or even better, talk directly with them. The best approach is to identify why your current customers already chose your product. The more unique problems you solve, the broader your addressable audience.
Identify why it matters now. Explain the urgency and add context. Why is this a problem worth solving today? The stronger your “why now” the easier it is to win attention.
Craft your core promise. For each of the problems you listed, define the clear promise your product delivers. Boil it down to one simple sentence that explains what you do. Your core promise should be short, memorable, and strong enough to become the foundation of your ads. Example: “The easiest way to [do X] without [problem].”
Expand into key angles. Break each core promise into 3–4 different angles you can test in ads. Each angle highlights a specific benefit: saving money, saving time, reducing stress, looking better, unlocking fun, etc. Example: Save time → “10 minutes a day is enough to make progress.”
Layer on emotional triggers. Tie each angle to a feeling that motivates action: relief, excitement, pride, security, belonging. Logical benefits get attention, but emotions drive clicks and conversions. Check out the Life Force 8 framework to understand which emotional triggers drive people to act. Example: Save time → relief: “Finally, a method that fits into your busy life.”
When you combine these steps, you turn a generic product pitch into a sharp value proposition with multiple testable angles. The key is to make sure every ad speaks to both rational benefits and emotional triggers. Start with at least 20 different angles, then experiment and double down on what works. This is just your starting point.
Effective Process
Ad production is a weekly, repeatable process. To make it work, you need tight communication between marketers and creative producers, clear ownership of tasks, a weekly production plan, well-organized asset storage, and a structured system to keep everything moving.
Tips for building an effective ad production process:
Set a weekly target. Decide how many new ads you will produce each week and stick to it. Start small, then increase output by about 10% each week as your team gets more efficient. Consistency beats one-off bursts.
Review performance. Hold weekly or twice-weekly check-ins between performance and creative. Kill underperformers, scale winners, and feed learnings directly into the next briefs.
Repurpose systematically. Each concept should generate multiple variations. For video, test different hooks, models, lengths, and text overlays. For static, test different styles, headlines, and visual elements.
Double down on what works. Create variations of every winning concept. A single ad might last only a few months, but strong concepts can work for years. Produce both small tweaks and deeper reworks to keep performance alive.
Set a win rate target. When you are just starting out, aim for about 10% of your ad concepts (not variations) to become winners. As you scale, expect that rate to drop closer to 5%, since low-hanging fruits disappear and your bar for a “winner” gets much higher.
Centralize assets. Store footage, raw files, and finished ads in one shared place with clear naming rules. It saves hours every week.
Focus on the right aspect ratios. For static, use 1:1 or 4:5, and resize to 9:16 only for proven winners. For video, 9:16 is enough. Keep everything inside the central 4:5 safe zone and let Meta automatically crop for Feed.
Test fast, not perfect. Launch variations quickly. Real audience data beats internal debates, and speed helps you find winners before fatigue sets in.
Build a feedback loop. Document what worked and why. Over time this becomes your creative playbook.
At Spiral, we make this entire process easier and faster. We’ve built our tool with this experience inside, and some of the most time-consuming steps are automated. From generating variations to tracking results, Spiral lets your team focus on strategy and ideation.
Testing Ads
First, understand the philosophy behind testing. The goal is not to find a perfect ad right away, but to quickly learn which angles, hooks, and formats resonate with your audience. Think of testing as buying data, not just buying conversions. This phase is an investment into future scale. The insights you gain now compound later, the ads you scale will come from patterns you discover during testing.
How to structure testing campaings
Start by dividing all campaigns into testing campaigns and scaling campaigns. Inside testing campaigns, each ad set should represent one ad concept you want to test. Each ad concept should contain 3–6 ad variations. Sometimes it can be more or less, but sticking to this range keeps learning efficient.
By default, use budget per ad set. This ensures every ad concept gets spend and is tested. Some ads will not receive meaningful impressions, that is normal. Allocate small, controlled budgets per concept ($50–$250 daily).
Switch to budget per campaign with multiple new ad sets only in two cases:
You do not have a marketer monitoring campaign performance daily. This way, you avoid overspending on ads that clearly do not work.
Your testing budget is limited and you need to find a winner right now. You risk losing insights and overall performance long-tem, but it can surface a new winning ad faster.
Avoid uploading all new weekly ads on the same day. Too many new ads at once can destabilize performance. Add no more than 25% of your total active ads per day.
Metrics to track
When testing ads, look at different signals. Early signals tell you if an ad grabs attention, mid signals show whether that attention is qualified, and final decision metrics confirm if the ad is profitable.
Early signals: CTR, thumbstop rate, engagement rate, CPC. These help you filter quickly, if people are not stopping or clicking, the ad will not scale.
Mid signals: Click-to-conversion rate, cost per signup, trial, or add-to-cart. These show if the traffic you are buying is qualified and if your funnel is doing its job.
Final decision metrics: CAC and ROAS. These are what you ultimately scale on. Once an ad consistently reach or beats your benchmarks here, it becomes a winner.
How to interpret results:
If early signals are weak but mid signals are strong, you probably found the right problem to solve, but the creative is not catching attention. Iterate on hooks, angles, and emotional triggers to make the ad stop the scroll.
If early signals are strong but mid signals are weak, the ad grabs attention but fails to convert. This means the format, hook, or key angle works for engagement but does not clearly communicate your product’s value. Iterate on these elements to turn attention into conversions. Note: we are not covering cases where your website or app itself fails to convert users.
Common mistakes
Testing too few creatives. Without enough quantity and diversity, you will not generate reliable learnings. You need a steady pipeline of new concepts to increase your odds of finding winners.
Over-optimizing for CTR. High click-through rates can look promising but mean little if those clicks do not convert. CTR is the most important attention metric, but it is too far from revenue. I have seen many winning ads with CTR below 1% that scaled profitably because they converted those few clicks extremely well.
Iterating on too many things at once. When testing variations of a winning ad, only change one element at a time. Otherwise, you cannot know which change caused the performance shift.
Stop creative testing. Halting creative testing after finding a winning concept is one of the biggest mistakes that limits growth. Every ad fatigues. If you stop launching new ideas, costs rise and performance stalls.
Relying on one ad type. Leaning on a single format or style, even if it works, is another trap that caps growth. Without exploring new angles and emotional triggers, performance flattens. Diversity keeps the system learning and results improving.
Failing to document learnings. Without a simple record of what worked and why, your team will waste resources repeating old mistakes. Build a feedback loop where every test adds to your creative playbook.
Scaling Ads
Now that you’ve finished testing, you know what your CAC and ROAS look like. At this point you need to decide whether to scale, keep testing, or pause. A strong winner can often cut CAC in half, but do not expect miracles — getting 5x cheaper results after testing 20 concepts is rare.
Sometimes ROAS will be lower than you hoped, and that is completely normal. It usually means the product or funnel needs more work before Meta can become your growth engine. The good news is that every round of testing gives you valuable data you can use to improve landing pages, onboarding, monetization, and pricing.
If you have found potential winners, congratulations! You nailed the testing phase, and now you have the foundation to scale. Scaling is about building on those wins, increasing spend with confidence, and keeping CAC and ROAS steady as you grow.
Stop vs Scale
Stop
Kill an ad after spending ~3-7× your CAC if it’s below benchmarks.
Turn off the ad set after ~5-10× CAC if results are still far from target.
Grey Zone
If results are borderline, not bad enough to stop but not strong enough to scale, let the ad run longer. You could increase the ad set budget by 20%.
Use insights from these ads to iterate on creatives. Sometimes a small variation turns a near-miss into a winner.
Scale
Once an ad consistently meets or beats your targets and has 10+ conversions, move it into scaling campaigns.
Keep iterating on ads that you push into scaling.
How to structure scaling campaings
There’s no single “correct” way to scale. Some of my advice may even differ from Meta’s own playbook, which is why you should always test in your account and, ideally, get input from an experienced marketer in your niche.
My go-to setup: campaign-level budget with 1–4 ad sets per campaign and no more than 25 ads in total. Each ad set should combine static + video for diversity, and all traffic should go to the same landing page or app. Only run ads that are proven or strong potential winners. You can keep adding new creatives into a working campaign — but never touch the targeting.
Use the broadest targeting that makes sense for your product. Add limits only if it’s clearly necessary. For example, if you have historical data showing poor performance in certain countries, audiences, or placements. Otherwise, the general rule is: don’t limit Meta.
Remember that every campaign, ad set, and ad starts in the Learning Phase, where Meta tests to find the right audience. This phase ends after ~50 optimization events per ad set. Major edits (budget, targeting, optimization event) reset learning, so avoid big changes once a campaign is performing.
When a campaign is working, you have two ways to scale:
Duplicate the campaign. My preferred method. It lets you scale faster and more stably. You can duplicate exactly or make small tweaks in the copy.
Increase budget. Safe rule: raise by ~20% every 3 days, or 5–7% daily. Larger jumps almost always push the campaign back into learning and cause unstable results.
Most products perform better on weekends, so it’s common to scale campaigns before the weekend and pause poor-performing ones on Monday.
Audience Expansion
Expansion is one of the biggest levers for scaling because it unlocks new audiences. Once you’ve proven your ads work with a core audience, the fastest way to grow is by reaching people you haven’t tapped yet.
Ways to expand:
Geography. Test new countries or regions where your product can operate. Start with markets similar to your core audience in purchasing power and culture. Research local competition and regulations, and adjust pricing and payment methods to fit the market.
Language. Localize your product and ads into new languages. Even within the same country, native-language ads often outperform English. In my own campaigns, simply translating top English creatives into Spanish drove a 25% MRR lift in 1 month.
Demographics. Test new age groups or genders with tailored creatives or messaging. Even small shifts can reveal segments with lower CAC or higher LTV, then you could expand further by adapting or customizing your product further.
Problems and Promises. Explore new value propositions by highlighting different problems your product solves or alternate benefits it delivers. The more problems you can credibly solve, the broader your reach and the more durable your growth.
Creative Analysis
This is where you turn performance data into scaling decisions. The goal is not to look at every metric but to focus on the ones that directly drive CAC and ROAS.
At the scaling stage, monitor performance daily but make decisions every 2–3 days. Daily spikes can be misleading, while multi-day trends show whether ads are truly working.
Keep reports simple, less is often more. Whenever possible, set them up to run automatically, whether through a Google Sheets script or an external tool. If automation isn’t an option, it’s worth asking if the data is truly essential. Manual reporting can take up a lot of time and energy that’s better spent on insights and action.
The real value of analysis is spotting patterns: which concepts keep winning, which creatives fatigue fastest, how CAC moves as you raise budgets, and which campaigns stay efficient at scale. Feed these insights directly into your creative pipeline so each new batch of ads has a higher chance of success.
How to work with Agencies
Working with agencies can be a powerful lever, but only if you approach it the right way. Treat agencies as partners, not magicians. They can bring fresh ideas and extra capacity, but they can’t fix a weak product or broken funnel.
Start by booking calls with multiple agencies that have proven success in your industry or with your competitors. If you don’t know where to begin, Clutch is a useful directory (not an ad). Choose agencies that understand your marketing goals, run smooth briefing process, offer clear pricing, and most importantly — earn your trust.
Agencies generally fall into two categories. Below I’ll share how to work with both and give practical tips for building strong partnerships. In my case, only about 1 in 5 pilots has turned into a long-term relationship, so it’s smart to test multiple agencies in parallel to find the right fit.
Ad production agencies
This type of agency can be useful at any stage. They help bring in new creative formats, boost output, and add diversity to your testing pool. That said, never rely on agencies alone. You need in-house production to double down on winners. Agencies bring fresh ideas, but only your own team can iterate fast enough to scale.
Most agencies charge per creative asset. A setup I like is running two sprints per month: every two weeks the agency delivers a set number of ad concepts, you test them, then return with performance data. This rhythm keeps output consistent and ensures you’re learning quickly.
To make the relationship work, build a data flywheel. Share your creative insights, audience learnings, and internal data so the agency can refine concepts and deliver stronger ads over time. Review results and give feedback every two weeks to close the loop before the next batch.
Another best practice is to work with a local agency when entering a new language or geography. They bring market expertise that speeds up your launch, and you’ll learn from them as you build your own playbook.
Pefrormance Agencies
Bring in performance agencies only once you already have some scale and solid historical data to guide negotiations. Usually after you’re spending at least $30K per month. Without that data, you’ll have no leverage, and most agencies will treat you as an easy client to bill rather than a long-term partner to grow with.
At this stage, the right agency can give you leverage to grow faster, especially when incentives are aligned. The best setups tie compensation to revenue or profit share, not flat fees.
I recommend working only with agencies that produce their own creatives and cover ad production costs on their side. This lets you learn from their winning concepts without risking them reusing or copying your ads, which would put you in direct competition for the same audience.
To set them up for success, share key data: your top-performing ad concepts, the demographics that convert best, and the essentials about your product. This ensures they produce the right creatives and configure their ad accounts correctly. Always request read access to those ad accounts for full transparency.
Discuss target KPIs and campaign limits before you start. Be clear on what CAC or ROAS is acceptable for you. For pilots, I recommend setting guardrails to make sure they focus on high-quality audiences. Once they prove they can deliver results, you can relax those limits so they have more room to scale.
Knowing when to stop working with an agency is just as important as knowing when to hire one. Agencies should be true growth partners — proactive in testing, iterating, and scaling. The right ones create leverage and open new opportunities, the wrong ones drain budget and slow you down. Once you see the relationship isn’t adding value, cut ties quickly. But if you’ve found a long-term growth partner, congratulations!
What’s next
AI is changing how ads are made and will keep reshaping the game. On Meta, your job is to compete for attention and sell solutions to people’s needs. Teams that adopt AI tools today move faster, test more ideas, and adapt quicker than those still stuck in manual workflows. Staying ahead here isn’t optional, it’s your survival and competitive edge.
Start simple and move fast. The path forward is about momentum, not perfection. Keep launching, keep learning, and keep feeding the system with fresh ideas. Each round of testing sharpens your edge, and each win builds a stronger foundation for the next.
Every product and team scales differently. Meta is never a straight path — too many variables, too many things outside your control. What I’ve shared here comes from 7 years of trial and error, and my hope is that it puts you a few steps ahead.
Thanks for reading. I’m grateful you spent your time here, and I’d love to hear how your journey goes. You can always reach me at sasha@spiral.ad